Now open for business: Official work begins today at S.J. County Administration Building

Monday

Aug 31, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 13, 2010 at 6:15 PM

STOCKTON - It is hard to miss the new San Joaquin County Administration Building.

Zachary K. Johnson

STOCKTON - It is hard to miss the new San Joaquin County Administration Building.

Glass walls at sharp angles climb six-stories on one corner, towering over the intersection of San Joaquin Street and Weber Avenue in the heart of downtown Stockton.

The corner is completed by a small outdoor plaza with a fountain of steel and rock in the middle. The building itself stretches a whole city block along Weber.

Some of the 500 or so employees soon to inhabit the 250,000 square-foot building have already set up shop inside. The public had its first chance to take a gander inside at a recent ribbon cutting, but the doors open for business today. The glass is meant to represent transparency in government, and the space immediately inside is designed to be open, inviting and easy to use for anyone coming to the building to conduct their business, county officials and the buildings architect said.

"A lot of people come here just one time a year or one time in their life. ... So, it really needs to be a building that's very easy to understand," said Curtis Fentress, the architect.

The building stands out and fits into downtown Stockton, he said. "We picked up on the horizontal lines of (Stockton's) historic buildings."

Departments will continue to move in through mid-September. Soon, 16 divisions of county government will be ensconced at 44 N. San Joaquin St. There's room inside for the number of employees to grow to 750.

Designed to be an example of environmentally-friendly construction, the building was just a hole in the ground two years ago. The structure itself cost $93 million of the $109 million project. That includes a $1.6 million art budget and the $1 the city of Stockton charged for most of the land beneath.

County officials said they are proud of what has been built. They say the building, and its place in downtown Stockton, is something the public can be proud of for decades to come.

How the new building will consolidate services can be seen in the offices of Assessor-Recorder-County Clerk Ken Blakemore. Under the old setup, his realm was divided into as many areas as he has titles. Now, instead of being on three floors in two buildings, his offices will be unified on the second floor.

There's room to grow and there will be more computers for the public to use, he said. Also, the second floor is the home for something completely different.

The Recorder's Office always has issued marriage licenses. Now couples can complete the transaction in the county's wedding chapel.

"We're really excited about that," Blakemore said. Happy couples can bring their own celebrants or recite their vows before a county employee. "We've never done this before; it's always been judges." The chapel will be available in October.

The offices of the county Board of Supervisors will open in the last wave. Instead of conducting their weekly meetings in the San Joaquin County Courthouse across the street, they will hold court in a glass-enclosed meeting room on the sixth floor.

Combined with the more-traditional aspects of the new building, the glass "explosion" of the atrium and chambers show the mix of historical and modern in the county, Chairman Leroy Ornellas said.

Though construction of the building began two years ago, the process has been longer. Along the way, county officials considered building the new facility in other county locations, such as near San Joaquin General Hospital or Stockton Metropolitan Airport.

In the end, Stockton offered to sell land next to the county's Cheadle Building for a dollar, and the downtown site was determined.

Demolition of that building is included in the project's price tag, said Gabe Karam, county facilities management director.

Creating the building was like putting together a huge puzzle, but it came in ahead of schedule and under budget, he said. It was finished so quickly because of the "design-build" process. That means construction began before all the designs were finished. The project was approved in stages.

But designing and building are not the only pieces of the puzzle. "We had to coordinate our process with every department head who was going to be in that building," Karam said. Those elected and hired officials made decisions quickly and kept pace with the project, he said.

The building won't be the last public project in Stockton's core. Approval recently was given to construct a new courthouse in nearby Hunter Square. The county plans to put in a plaza, complete with underground parking in the place of the old courthouse.

Most recently, downtown landlords have voiced concern about vacancies left from departing county agencies. Prospects of filling in the vacancies have dimmed as the economy has flagged.

The county took on the project before the lean times began.

About 30 percent of the building's funding comes from fees on new development. That money started being collected after the supervisors and the county's seven cities agreed on a County Facilities Fees program in 2005.

An additional 10 percent comes from savings realized by using the county-owned building property instead of through leasing office space. An additional 15.5 percent of the cost is covered through the county's role in operating state and federal programs.

The remaining 44.5 percent of the cost will be covered by the county's General Fund.

However, the county's year-to-year payment to finance that debt won't be affected until 2019, County Administrator Manuel Lopez said. That's because the nearly $115 million in bonds issued to pay for the building in 2007 also refinanced existing county facilities debt.